Have several things teed up for Monday. But we’ll let them go for now, on this, the 39th anniversary of the ruling in Roe v. Wade (yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the Citizens United decision, so it’s a big weekend for Supreme Court anniversaries). Some links instead.

• Obviously we had the major shake-up in the Republican primary race, with Newt Gingrich winning the South Carolina primary. Florida becomes very important, though not fatal for Romney unless he just gets swamped. That’s a big state with a lot of media markets, and money will loom large as a factor. However, the very Republican panhandle is practically part of Gingrich’s home state of Georgia, which could be a factor as well.

• The race has already changed in one respect: Mitt Romney will release his 2010 tax returns, and an estimate for 2011. He won’t go beyond that because of “the Internet.” Obviously critics will question why only two years are being released; I don’t think this helps Romney out of this box at all.

• In Indiana, unions hit the airwaves trying to stop the right-to-work legislation which could get a vote as early as tomorrow, while video is discovered showing Governor Mitch Daniels opposing right-to-work changes back in 2004, when he still had to face voters.

• RIP Joe Paterno, who died on Sunday, contrary to news reports on Saturday. I’ve seen studies recently about how you really can die of a broken heart. After the disgraced ending at Penn State, Paterno may have had little left to live for.

• Wow, the establishment media really feels threatened by Stephen Colbert, ay? Incidentally, Herman Cain, who benefited from Colbert Super PAC ads in the final week in South Carolina and a push from Colbert to vote for him as a proxy, got 1% of the vote in the state, including over 2% in Charleston, where he and Colbert held a rally on Friday.

• Colbert actually picked up an endorsement from Congressman Dennis Cardoza, though I think this is more about his general antipathy toward President Obama than anything.

14 Responses
to “The Roundup for January 22, 2012”

I’m gonna say it one more time: the RNC took away half Florida’s delegates for jumping the primary line, so that state only has 49 delegates. But the RNC let the state party keep its winner-take-all rules.

One state. One primary. 49 delegates. Winner-take-all. Whoever wins will have a massive lead in delegates.

Neoliberal Andrew Cuomo takes a page out of the Republican playbook
and uses the next New York State budget as a wedge for policy `reforms’ –
like introducing a two-tier system, with new state employees having worse benefits.

Does the USA Patriot Act give the U.S. government too much access to data stored on the cloud servers of American providers regardless of where those servers are located? That’s the concern among European IT leaders.

“The unease over the reach of Patriot Act provision—which expands the discovery mechanisms law enforcement can use to access third-party data—has been amped up by the sales and marketing efforts of some European cloud providers, seeking to set apart their services as a way to keep corporate data out of the hands of the American government. The most blatant examples are two Swiss companies touting their cloud options as “a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act,” but it’s become a popular topic at negotiating tables across the continent.”

“Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

“A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

‘“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park
The Yasuni National Park, known as “the lungs of the world” and one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is under threat from oil drilling. The race is on to find the funds required to develop new sustainable energy programmes that would leave the oil – and the forest – untouched.

Nate Silver lets slip the most candid assessment of the presidential nominating process that you’ll ever read in the mainstream media:

Although the nomination is technically decided by delegate counts, and somewhat less literally by the preferences of rank-and-file voters, ultimately the nominee is determined by a sort of open negotiation among the party elite, which includes elected officials, major donors and the partisan news media, among others.

Regarding Mitten’s tax returns: before 2010, you start to run into the massive Mormon funding for Prop h8 in California. I half expect he is under orders from the First Presidency not to disclose just how much of his personal wealth went into the imposition of theocratic hate.

I heard a Tunisian speak on a podcast at the beginning of the Arab Spring last year and he explained that there is little gun violence, even by criminals, in Tunisia. So when the police were ordered to fire on the protesters, the idea of shooting other humans simply was not part of their being, and they refused to fire.

Compare that to American culture where firing guns at other humans is glorified and you can see why campus police & municipal police have no problem using military-occupation-type violence on peaceful protesters.